Speaking to a Khmer reporter from Radio Free Asia on April 17, Ta Mok delivered a more brutal epitaph. “Pol Pot has died,” he said, “like a ripe papaya. No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s finished, he has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer.”48

Pol Pot died in the sort of ignominy he had inflicted on millions of Khmer, under conditions almost as dehumanized as those encountered by his victims. It was rough justice, and at his death he was difficult to mourn.

What was his legacy? What had he looked for, and what had he accomplished in his years in power? A vision like his—of an autarkic, all-powerful Cambodia—has probably flickered in the minds of other Cambodian leaders since the decline of Angkor in the fifteenth century. Some of them had succumbed to it and had sought patrons (and clients) who could help them bring the vision to life. Others, the majority perhaps, weighed the vision against Cambodia’s resources, the cost of leaping into the dark, and their own mundane priorities. In post-Angkorean Cambodia, antiheroic behavior for leaders and ordinary people alike made sense. One price of antiheroism—and this, for a time, played into the Communists’ hands—was a stoic or resentful acceptance of hierarchies that paid no attention to “lesser” people except insofar as they could serve and feed the rich and powerful.

Pol Pot belongs among the visionary leaders of Cambodian history. At some stage in his life—perhaps in Paris, perhaps earlier—he reacted against the subservience and quietude of the Cambodian people. The royal family’s indolence depressed him. His distress at Cambodia’s dependence on Vietnam and France was probably genuine; he shared it with other Cambodian intellectuals at the time. In the early 1950s he came to see communism as a set of empowering and liberating techniques that could be applied to Cambodia to remove the handicaps of hierarchy, injustice, and subservience. The crucial role to be played by intellectuals like himself in this process meant that the actual priorities of Cambodia’s poor, which would have centered around their families, their religion, and their leisure time, were disregarded for the sake of supposedly larger goals. In Saloth Sar’s case, the vision of society seems to have been colored by a more personal one. He probably saw the Communist movement as an avenue through which he could find and express his personal identity, partly in terms of exercising power over others, so as to control the future.